Magic Mansion (16 page)

Especially since the Gold Team was continually hugging each other. And smiling.

John sighed.

Jia pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to Fabian and John who both shook their heads, then tapped one out, lit it, and took a deep, thoughtful drag. “So you’re married,” she said to Fabian, “right?”

“Thirty-seven years,” he said.

She looked for John’s left hand, but he hadn’t bothered to remove his gardening gloves. “What about you?”

“No.”

The terseness of his reply didn’t seem to discourage her. She didn’t strike John as someone who lacked for audacity. “Because someone on the crew may have let it slip that I’d be way less likely to be voted off the show if I could get a little on-camera romance going.”

John wondered what she wanted from him. His blessing? Doubtful. Maybe some advice. “I suppose it might make interesting drama.”

Fabian made a scoffing sound that sounded like, “Psheh.”

“I know, lame, right?” Jia bent forward to peer around Fabian at John. “But give it some thought, Professor. ’Cos I’m betting the Red Team gets pared down for losing last night’s challenge—no offense, Fabian—and I’m not ready to go home just yet.”

“Give what…?” Oh, hell. She’d been looking for a lot more than John’s advice. Casey would have found his shock over the thought of romancing her, even faux-romancing her, laughable. Then again, Casey let everything roll off his back. Maybe even things he should have taken a bit more seriously.

“All right, everyone,” Marlene called out. “Your bat-free zone is ready. And don’t think we’ve spared you any effort to move things along. There’s plenty of time before your next challenge. So let’s get chopping.”

Kevin Kazan sauntered over in John’s general direction, and Jia shot up off the retaining wall and stomped to the opposite end of the designated punishment zone. He tagged along, saying, “Yo…yo!” as if he thought he had a chance of getting her to answer to “Yo.” Fabian shook his head and veered toward the corner of the lot with his pruners, where he started whacking off huge chunks of bramble.

John took a moment to size up the patch of neglected yard. No rotten palms here, that was good. He glanced up. No bats either that he could see, though they looked a heck of a lot like leaves when they hung there sleeping. He placed a hand on the trunk of an opportunistic weed tree that had sprung up to nearly eight feet, and he felt. Whatever life touched it seemed small to him. Ants. Beetles. Nothing larger than that.

He planted his feet and began to saw.

“Good plan,” Ken Barron said, falling in beside him. “Take care of the big stuff first. Get it out of the way. While you’re fresh.”

“That’s the idea,” John said, although in actuality he’d never been much of a planner. Since he was slow to speak his mind but his eyes were shrewd, people had a tendency to assume his actions were always unfolding to the scheme of a master plan he was constantly assessing and tweaking. But nothing could be further from the truth. John had discovered life was more like surfing. You could try to plan, but in the end, there was nothing to do but keep your head above water and do your best to catch the waves so they didn’t pound you.

“You’re in pretty good shape,” Ken observed.

For his age
—that was probably the unspoken part of the sentiment. Though with last night’s defeat fresh in his mind, it was more likely Ken meant,
compared to Fabian
.

“I suppose.”

“A century ago, a magician who was forty, fifty…he’d be in his prime. Not like today.”

“So my agent tells me.”

“Houdini was fifty-two when he died,” Ken said.

“Indeed.”

“But now? No one looks twice at a middle-aged magician unless he’s already got a following under his belt. So I heard about this show….” Ken lopped a few branches off a shrub that would have been better tamed by snipping it off near the root. “And I just thought…if I can’t crack this thing by the time I’m forty…if I can’t make my name now…well then, what’s it all for, anyway? I might as well hang up my handcuffs and go sell insurance.”

John stopped sizing up the next weed tree and turned to get a better look at Ken. Not full-on, of course, because Ken clearly had the very male approach of sliding his important personal revelations into the conversation while everyone’s attention was focused instead on the task at hand. But in his peripheral vision, John saw that Ken was lopping at the bush a bit harder than he needed to.

John moved closer and began sawing at the bush’s base. “You have a name, Ken. You’re the biggest escape artist on the circuit. And now that you’ve landed this show, a whole new audience knows who you are.”

Ken made a sound that John initially took for a laugh, until he realized it was more likely a sob. Ken began lopping the bush even harder. “An idiot. A fool. That’s what they know.”

Emotion—anger, or maybe despair—could have been the cause…or maybe it was simple physics, the lopper blades glancing off a burl in the wood. Whatever the reason, the results were the same. The garden tool skidded, down and at an angle. Directly toward the spot where John knelt.

He sensed it just before it hit, and he jerked away. The duration of the incident was a fraction of a second. It sounded no more threatening than a snip and a rustle.

“Oh, man,” Ken said. “That was close. I’m really sorry.”

John stayed right where he’d landed—on the lawn, back on his elbows, as if he’d just been relaxing on a deck chair, sipping a mojito, and levered up a few inches to check out the pool boy. His heart hammered so fiercely that the pulse pounding in his ears blotted out the rest of the sounds in the yard, as if the water tank from the first night’s challenge had been placed around his head again to narrow down his auditory landscape to the beating of his own heart.

“Holy crap. You’re bleeding.”

John made out the words, but they sounded muted. Distant. And then Ken flung down the sharp tool and knelt beside him.
 

John caught the sweet tang of alcohol on Ken’s breath.

“It’s okay,” Ken said, possibly speaking loudly. “Just a scratch.”

The sound of Marlene’s voice threaded into John’s awareness, and he supposed it meant his cognizance was synching back into speed with the rest of the world again. And he also supposed he’d be well and truly afraid once he remembered how to think.

Ken’s face was ashen. “I am so sorry.”

John touched the spot on his cheekbone before he even realized it stung. Cameras swarmed. Marlene pushed through them. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” John’s voice sounded like his own—maybe. Yes, he supposed it did.

“It was an accident,” Ken said, backing away. “I mean, I can’t even say for sure it was the shears. Could have been something else—a briar, or maybe a sharp twig that snapped back at him.”

Marlene’s frown lines intensified as she scowled at John’s face. He touched his cheek again. His fingers came away sticky. Clotting already. It really wasn’t that bad.

“I’m calling in a plastic surgeon,” she said.

“Marlene,” John protested.

“You’re a performer. I don’t take a facial injury lightly on someone who makes his living with his appearance.”

Well. Since she put it that way. She slipped an arm through his elbow to march him over to the standby medics, ordering up a specialist on her phone by the time they were across the lawn. No less than three handhelds jockeyed for position as the medical technician flooded the small wound with a sterile solution and began cleaning off the blood.

Maybe Kevin’s bats wouldn’t be the headlining melodramatic commercial bumper after all.

The plastic surgeon was there within fifteen minutes—this was L.A., after all—and he took a good look at the injury with a magnifying light that made sparkles dance in John’s peripheral vision. “You’re dark-complected. Do you scar easily?”

“No.”

“Any keloids?”

“No.”

“Prior surgeries? Anything I can look at to get a sense of…?”

“None.”

The surgeon glanced at John’s forearms as if surely there would be a scar or two present to give him away—after all, one didn’t spend as many years on the planet as John had without picking up a souvenir or two—but there were none there for him to see. The worst damage was on John’s lower legs. Coral. Driftwood. A broken bottle buried in the sand that nearly cost him his small toe. But those scars were not only ancient, they’d been the results of injuries that were a heck of a lot more severe than this new scratch on his cheek.

Marlene, who had been wrangling the rest of the magicians, rematerialized in John’s spotty vision once the magnifying light just under his eye was switched off. “Does he need stitches?”

“No. I put a clear sealant over the wound—”

“How about one of those butterfly bandages? That would look kind of tough.”

John almost laughed at the notion of being called “tough,” though he supposed he was still too dazed to properly react.

The doctor said, “It’s really not deep enough to warrant—”

“But it wouldn’t hurt anything,” Marlene said. “Right?”

“Of course not.” The surgeon gave a you’re-the-boss nod and pulled a butterfly suture from his kit. He applied it just below John’s eye without shrugging or apologizing in any way. Though John suspected he might have wanted to.

Chapter 17

RED TEAM ELIMINATION

An unmanned camera on a tripod was in the ballroom with John where he rested up from his big injury and attempted to pass the time by reading a magazine. He could have gone back to his room, but the dorm-style 4-bed layout reminded him too much of his college days. Not that those were bad days. Many of them, in fact, were rather good. Just that they were so long past, it seemed disingenuous to go through the motions now.
 

It felt strange to sit outside the action, with the sounds of the outdoor filming carrying on just beyond the window. He supposed, were he a heavier drinker (like a certain member of the Red Team) he might be tempted by the proximity of the decently-stocked bar. But John had always preferred to have company and conversation with his liquor.

As well as…other things.

As John realized he’d just entertained a notion which, while perfectly natural, had been scarce in his repertoire of thoughts lately, he marveled at the idea that Ricardo hadn’t even needed to be present to elicit the unexpected flush of desire. The mere thought of him could start John’s pulse pounding as surely as a sharp implement swung at his head.

“Professor Topaz?”

John looked up from the tedious issue of People and found the object of his fantasies there, framed in the archway as surely as if he’d just been summoned, clutching shopping bags in both hands. He wore black trousers, a gold vest and a rose-colored silk shirt with billowy sleeves, and his Gold Team medallion glinted as if a lighting team had arranged for a spotlight to hit it just so. His posture was straight and tall, like he was about to use the bags for balance while he strode across a tightrope, head high, and smiling.

He looked absolutely radiant.

“Oh my God…what happened to your face?” Ricardo’s smile vanished; he dropped the bags and sprinted across the room. The soles of his dress shoes slid the last few feet across the polished marble. “Are you okay?”

John stood, and mouthed the word “camera.” Once Ricardo nodded to show he’d understood, John said, “It’s just a scratch.”

Ricardo planted his hands on his hips. His hair—the makeover team had done something to his hair, something subtle, but even more flattering…which John wouldn’t have even thought possible. John stared at Ricardo’s hair. Ricardo stared at the butterfly suture. And when the pull between them reared up, it was heady and strong, overwhelmingly strong—so strong that John repeated, “Camera,” this time nearly aloud.

Ricardo narrowed his eyes. The late afternoon light hit them just so and lit his irises the color of the stormy Pacific, and the undertow of his nearness began dragging at John yet again—this time so intensely it pulled him forward a full step.

Ricardo took a step forward too, and now their chests would be touching, if either of them leaned in…and it was taking all of John’s focus to resist doing just that.

Ricardo parted his lips, and wet them with the tip of his tongue. John felt himself groan. “Camera,” he said—aloud now—and a heated look flashed in Ricardo’s eyes… just before the Mansion trembled.

Not a quake, nothing quite so obvious. A mere flicker. A twitch.

Above the camera rig, rotten lath in the ceiling gave way with a creak and a sigh, and plaster hunks rained down upon the equipment as surely as if the building itself had aimed them there.

The corner of Ricardo’s mouth quirked.

“Control yourself,” John forced himself to say. Because if anyone were to ask him in that moment what he actually wanted, it would have been to see Ricardo, beautiful Ricardo, saying
To hell with it all!
and letting the dams burst wide, and allowing the full force of his True power to surge forth.

But instead, Ricardo merely touched his fingertips to John’s wound, and cocked his head, and said, “Do you realize how close this came to your eye?”

With Ricardo’s nearness singing through his veins, John managed to utter, “It’s nothing. It’s fine.” And before they could say anything more, the room flooded with crew, and then the rest of the Gold Team trooped in laden with shopping bags filled with styling products, and then Iain with his cell phones and his perpetual annoyance. But even as Ricardo turned away, the headiness of his touch lingered, and John decided that despite the risk of discovery, and despite the chaos his ill-advised action had caused…despite everything, that single brush of Ricardo’s fingers had been worth it.

___

Once the dust settled, the plaster was cleared, the ceiling was shored up and the handhelds were once again making their lazy circuit around the ballroom, Ricardo lined up with his teammates and watched the Red Team troop in. While it was true that no magician on the opposing team was a jovial, smiley sort of performer, it seemed to Ricardo that tonight they were particularly angry.